The Beginning

Dear Reader (s), the emptiness of air, luminiferous aether, stars, plasma, planets, machine elves, fairies, angels (or whoever or whatever may encounter these words ) –

I remember once reading Joseph Campbell (who has saved my life more than once) paraphrasing parts of the philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Transcendent Speculation upon an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual ” and being struck by the idea that as one ages and looks back on one’s life, it is a common occurrence for the individual to see this life as a “cleverly constructed novel” – and that those people who have come in and out of that life in the course of the plot have helped create the character that we have become. As I near the end of my 44th year, I have been blessed to have many characters who were once in my early chapters return again, to add meaning to an already unfolding story.

One of these characters is Steve, who is co-writing this blog with me – and who has coaxed and encouraged me to begin writing again. Steve and I met in high school and formed an unlikely friendship – I was the plastic homecoming-princess type and Steve was the smoking-court intellectual who kept a low profile. We worked on the school newspaper together and began a deep romance – only on paper, in the notes and letters we penned to each other and kept folded neatly in places away from our other teenage romances….and only in our minds. We lost touch after high school -- where there was military and marriages and college and kids and adult lives to be lived.

Now, twenty-six years later, we have reconnected. One week before Steve contacted me again, I called out into the air, “Where are you, Steve?!” He must have heard my call -- or perhaps the creator of the novel that is my life or the dreamer who is dreaming me heard my plea. Whatever the case, this reconnection seems divine in nature. We created his blog to force ourselves to begin writing again, and to capture some of our collective musings and debates into printed word. As Leary once said, “Words are the freezing of reality”.

Steve and I are fascinated with this reality – and its shifting landscape – as we sometimes lose our footing and end up in “Chapel Perilous”. In the end, we see ourselves on a quest for The Key, on our own glorious monomyth trying to find some ultimate light – whatever that means. Sometimes, we see angels and fairies and trees that light the way. Sometimes Eiseley’s “Trickster” comes in and sends us into the dark and, like the monkeys we are, we end up throwing a bunch of word-shit at our social and physical cages. All we know is that being together as we undertake our journey makes this life we are living a little less lonely.

Schopenhauer (as paraphrased by Campbell) remarks on the interconnectedness of all humanity: “ [T]he dreams and lives of all interlock, as though of a single, superordinated context” – and in having these interlocked dreams, what may seem like an experience that is only for ourselves, actually has impact on others around us, “linking and according with everything else.” May this blog be for exploring those links and the “dream that is dreaming us”.